SUCCESS Secrets | Stop Doing THIS to Thrive

Next, this is a long quote from Andrew Carnegie. It's basically talking about putting your eggs in one basket. And the common advice is don't put your eggs all in one basket because it's really risky. And what he's saying, he was the richest man in the world for a period of time, he likes to put all his eggs in one basket. And he watches that basket. He says it's too difficult to watch too many baskets. And I think that's a challenge a lot of entrepreneurs face is they have a million things going on at once. And as a result of trying to do too much, the quality sucks, right? You're not doing anything really well. Where if you really focus in on only one basket and you make sure you do a really, really good job of that, then you're much more likely to be able to achieve your success. So having lots of baskets might be good from an investment point of view. You want to diversify if you're putting your money into stocks, you don't want to all buy one stock. But as an entrepreneur, the recommendation here is put your eggs in one basket and really, really focus on it and overdeliver. So if you're selling to business, focus on the business and try to provide an awesome value proposition to them and make sure you're doing everything you can to have them get a result that they want to keep hiring you back and back and back over and over and over again. Number 10, don't spend until you earn. And this is a common challenge that a lot of entrepreneurs face, is they're trying to get money to start up the business. And I hate spending money until I'm making money. And I get a lot of emails from people writing in saying, I need to raise capital to launch a business. It was venture capital or, you know, $500 or $5,000 or whatever it is. Whenever you can, you want to try to start a business without spending money. Try to earn a little bit before you start paying out. Anybody can spend money. If I gave you all $1 million, you could all go out and find a million ways to spend it. That's not the challenge as an entrepreneur. It's how do you earn it. And as a venture capitalist, we saw all sorts of deals that we just said no to because they weren't earning anything. It was just an idea. On paper, and you want to show and prove to yourself that you have legitimate valuable idea. Even now, whenever I'm launching new programs, I always start off doing it in a way that I'm not spending any money. So for those of you who've seen my YouTube videos as an example, if you've seen it on Facebook or the newsletter, the very first ones were really, really bad. The content was good, I think, but the production quality was brutal. And I just had my own little crappy tiny camera and put it on a shelf and started recording myself. And the lighting was bad and the quality was bad and there was no microphone so the audio quality was bad. And I did that because I didn't want to go start spending money on a new project until I knew that I was going to be able to make money from it. And so as I started being able to monetize it, then I started investing into better equipment. And got a better camera and got a tripod and got lighting and get a backdrop and all the things that maybe made sense in the beginning, said, oh, I should have done that. But we'll try lots of different projects and only stick with the ones that we see as being able to generate return for us. So the danger is getting too excited about an idea, going out and spending a whole whack of money on it, and then it doesn't succeed. I'd rather start small, take a smaller profit margin on it, and then start investing into, as I see it, achieving success. I recently had a lunch with somebody who was creating his own design of t-shirts, and his challenge, which is I think a common one whenever you're ordering a product, is he got so excited about his idea that he ordered a whole bunch of these t-shirts, and now he's sitting on this inventory. That he can't sell. And yes, you can, you know, the cost goes down as you get higher quantities, right? Anytime you're making purchases, if you're buying tons of quantity, your cost per unit goes down. So it's attractive and there's an incentive to want to make big orders. The challenge there is you don't know if that's going to sell or not. So I'd rather start much smaller, do it on print on demand, use a service like CafePress where you're not going to make a lot of money. Your profit per shirt or whatever your product is, it's not going to be high. But you're making sure that you're not going to lose a ton of money, right? You're not going out spending all this money and you're stuck sitting on a whole bunch of inventory. So whatever your program is, and this is great especially if you're doing a service type of business, you don't have to spend a lot of money. It's your time. Launch it, right? You want to spend your time but you don't want to inject a ton of capital into it until you see that you're able to make some kind of return. And it's really tough to see— I get a lot of emails, people telling their story and pouring their heart out of how they invested everything into this business idea and they mortgaged their home and their wife or husband is about to leave them because they've spent so much of their money on this company and they still haven't proven that it can make any money. And so I don't want you guys to go out and spend all this cash, whatever you have, The amount is relative. If you only have $10,000 in your bank account, that's a lot of money to go out and spend on the business. I try to not spend any money, go out, try to make some initial orders, sales, really small scale, prove to yourself that this is something that you can build the business off of, and then slowly expand. You'll find that the businesses who are very conscious of cash flow at the beginning are the ones who are really successful down the line because they're used to that thinking about bootstrapping and being able to save every penny that they can. So as much as you can, don't spend until you earn. From Lillian Vernon, work hard, that's the bottom line. Don't spend more money than you've got. Don't spend money before you've got it. So your challenge is go out, try to earn a couple bucks, and then you can invest a little bit of that back into your company. And just keep hustling and keep spending your time to go out and earn more. Steve Jobs: Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about the money, it's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get. So again, it's not how much you're spending that's not going to dictate your success. It's about how much hustle you have, and if you're building a business model that makes sense or not. Number 11, don't let the naysayers get you down. This is a huge challenge for a lot of people. You know, if you don't have entrepreneurs in your family or if your friends aren't entrepreneurs, when you say you're starting a business, there's a lot of people who may wish you good luck, but they're afraid for you. The ones who care about you are afraid. Entrepreneurship is not a really easy, safe way to earn a living compared to getting a corporate job. And so they may discourage you and say, "Why don't you just go and get a job like everybody else?" and kind of shut down your ideas a little bit, even if they do support you. You'll also have the friends or the so-called friends who may be jealous. They always wanted to do something but were too afraid to take the leap, and so they say, "Oh, that's never going to work." And so out of their own insecurities, they want to make you feel bad for launching a business. As much as possible, you want to try to ignore the naysayers. What I found particularly helpful for me was a couple things. One, I took comfort in the fact that I knew I was helping people, and that goes back to, again, rule number 1 about doing something you're really passionate about. If you know you're really excited about what you're doing and you know that you're helping people, that gets you through a lot of these negative situations that will come up as you launch and run your business. If somebody said, "Oh, you know, you're never going to make it," but then you see some great feedback from somebody saying, "Thank you, you really helped me," that's good motivation to want to keep going and keep going and keep going. So I encourage you as much as possible, again, start around something you're really excited about and then tie back into that every time you get into some kind of a negative situation if somebody tells you it's not going to work out. We even do this internally at our own company. We have a whole bunch of people who write for our website. 7,000 people write for my website, and people on my team, they get emails every day from them saying, you know, things that may not be working out, they don't understand. Basically, they're dealing with all the problems. And so they're getting negative feedback every day to say, "We need to fix this, we need to fix this." people don't quite understand how something works. But they're only dealing with the people who have problems, where most of the people really enjoy it and love it and find great value. So what I do every month is I send them a list of all the great things that people have said about them and about us so that they can also see, hey, you know what, we're helping a lot of people and there's a lot of value in what we're doing. So I found that helpful. Now if you're not really passionate about what you're doing and you're not really helping people, If you're in some kind of scam business or something, that's hard to get excited about, right? People say, "No, you're just scamming people," and you are, and you believe you're scamming people, then maybe it's time to actually do a different business. But this I'm talking about when you actually are adding value to people's lives and making them, you know, giving them a lot of value. So that's one thing that helped me. The other thing was looking at famous entrepreneurs, and I was a little scared when I first started my first real business. I was 19 years old. I didn't really know what I was doing. And I researched famous entrepreneurs, and we talked about modeling success in the last workshop, but find people who you look up to and research their story, and you'll find that everybody struggled. The guys who are the most successful now, any name you want to throw out there, if it's Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or whoever it is, they all had big challenges when they were starting out, and they all doubted themselves, and they all had all these problems. And you don't see any of that stuff. But reading their stories and understanding what they had to overcome, at least for me, made me feel like I can do this too. You know, they had all these problems and they were able to overcome it, and a lot of people were telling them that it wasn't going to work out, and they made it happen. So that gave me a motivation. Sometimes all you need is the one more day, you know, the, the motivation to go one more day, and sometimes that's the day that gets you over the hump, and tomorrow is a brighter day. Try not to listen to the naysayers. Try to surround yourself with people, either customers who are giving you great feedback or people who you may not know but respect as the modeling mentors. Or you can also try to find people who are in your local area who are entrepreneurs and get together and try to help each other out. We run a group of mastermind groups here in Toronto and the entrepreneurs get together once a month and we sit down and we talk about our businesses and we try to help each other out. And sometimes it's around, you know, how do I market myself, what are you doing that works, and sharing best practices. But a lot of the benefit also is just realizing that other people are facing the same problems as me and they may be doubting themselves and one month they doubt themselves and the next month they're doing awesome. So being around other people who are entrepreneurs can be a tremendous boost so you can help each other out. When you're down, they can help you, and when they're down, you can help them. It's really hard when you are the only person who is the entrepreneur in your immediate circle of friends and family. So try to surround yourself with some people or joining webinars like this or whatever it is that gets you excited and motivated and feel like you can do it. Keep trying to do those and try to block out the other people in your life. Ted Turner, founder of CNN: All my life people have said that I wasn't gonna make it. You can never quit. Winners never quit. Quitters never win.